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his House seat in November. He con-
tested the election, but the House of
Representatives rejected his case, which
in part rested on allegations that felons
had voted illegally. The Paul family be-
lieved that the race had been stolen. But
both defeats turned out to be temporary.
Ron Paul won back the seat in 1978 and
returned to the House, and Reagan was
elected President two years later. Rand
was less eager to discuss the events of
the next decade, when his father’s liber-
tarianism and Reagan’s conservatism
gradually took divergent paths.
In1981,RandenteredBaylorUniver-
sity, a Baptist school in Waco, four
hours from home. He immediately set
himself apart. He contributed regularly
to the school newspaper, the Lariat,
drawing on Ayn Rand, Hayek, and
Mises’s disciple Murray Rothbard. He
studied biology (as his father had in
college) and liked to challenge Waco’s
fundamentalists, some of whom criti-
cized the school for teaching evolution.
George Paul, the son of a prominent
Texas political fund-raiser, was Rand’s
closest friend in college. George told
me, “Many of the students had never
left Texas and could be very limited in
their outlooks.” He said that on Sun-
days he and Rand often visited different
churches in an attempt “to observe how
people practice their spirituality,” and
frequently debated “individuals who
very literally interpret the Bible, who
question many scientific theories.” He
added,“We would start digging by ask-
ing very direct questions, and people’s
inability to answer them would fluster
them and in some ways make it un-
comfortable for them—and hopefully
inspire one or two to think back on it
later.” He recalled that he and Rand
would debate anti-abortion extremists
calling for the death penalty for doctors
who performed abortions. (“Senator
Paul denies that he went church to
church seeking out people to argue with
on religious matters,” Brian Darling,
Paul’s communications director, said.)
Rand’s friendship with George Paul
was itself a small act of rebellion.
George and Rand, who were both on
the Baylor swim team and often spent
six hours a day in the pool, became so
close that, shortly after they arrived at
Baylor, George legally changed his
name from George Paul Schauerte to
George Schauerte Paul. George was
known on campus for his ability to acquire
things without paying for them. He ex-
plained to me that he had “a God-given
talent for being able to find things on
short notice when they’re needed.” He
once procured tanks of nitrous oxide from
a friend studying dentistry. “He called
them pleasure units,” Kristy Ditzler, who
was on the swim team with Rand and
George, said. She, Rand, and George got
high on laughing gas. “ We attached a
scuba mask directly to it,” George said.
“ We knew it was dangerous, but we also
knew how to adjust the air mixture to
keep it just right.” (“College was a long
time ago,” Paul said in a statement. “ The
high jinks reported by others make my
college experience sound way more ad-
venturesome than it actually was.”)
George, now a teacher and consul-
tant living in Austria, drew Rand into a
secret society at Baylor known as the
NoZe Brotherhood, which had recently
been banned from campus. The group
was founded in the nineteen-twenties
mostly to mock Baylor’s clubs and fra-
ternities and to satirize its earnest reli-
giosity. In 1982, Baylor’s president con-
demned the group for its “sacrilegious,
vulgar, obscene, and sometimes tasteless
crudities.” For initiation, called “un-
rush,” Rand was required to submit a
satirical essay of “10,622 words or less.”
George said that Rand signed the
document with the name of a nine-
teenth-century anarchist and aboli-
tionist, Lysander Spooner, who later
opposed the Civil War on the ground
that states had the right to secede.
Spooner has become a revered figure to
modern libertarians, especially in the
South, where some revisionist histori-
ans have embraced his antislavery and
anti-Lincoln views.
The brothers liked Rand’s essay, and
he moved on to the next stage in the
initiation, the Raz. According to George,
the brothers put a bag over Rand’s head
and spirited him away to their “sanctum
sanctorum,” a garage behind the group’s
off-campus headquarters, known as
Xanadu. It was decorated with items
that George, whose secret name was
KleptoNoZe, had stolen, including “a
box full of human skulls” that he said
he’d found in a science building and a
jacket he’d taken from a police officer.
Rand was placed in a claw-foot bathtub
while the brothers gathered around him
in absurdist costumes they called “un-
dress,” shone a bright light on his face,
and tested his wits by shouting ridicu-
lous questions. (“What effect did ortho-
dontics have on nineteenth-century
Romanticism?”) Rand excelled at the
Raz and advanced to a more serious in-
terview—conducted under a highway
bridge—before being confirmed for
membership. The brothers gave him his
secret name: SpoonNoZe.
Rand was a member of another group
that attracted campus dissidents:
the Young Conservatives of Texas. It
was founded by Munisteri in 1980 as a
more conservative breakaway organiza-
tion from Young Americans for Free-
dom, which had been started by Wil-
liam F. Buckley in 1960. Munisteri told
me that he and his colleagues didn’t like
taking orders from the national Y.A.F.
leadership.
Rand, who arrived the year after the
Y.C.T.’s founding, became a leader of
the Baylor chapter, which spread the
Paul family gospel. Ron Paul became an
adviser to the group and spoke on cam-
pus several times. In November of 1981,
during Rand’s first semester, he and his
father screened “The Incredible Bread
Machine,” an anti-government docu-
mentary with a counterculture sensi-
bility. It opened with I.R .S. agents
confiscating horses from a farmer, cops
seizing land, and federal agents break-
ing into the wrong home during a drug
raid.The following semester, the Y.C.T.
sponsored a talk on Austrian econom-
ics. In the fall of 1982, it hosted Johnny
Stewart, a conspiracy theorist who was
obsessed with the Council on Foreign
Relations, the Trilateral Commission,
and the Bilderberg Group, an interna-
tional network of political and industry
élites. The next semester, the Y.C.T. in-
vited Kitty Werthmann to speak. An
Austrian exile who warned that Amer-
ica was creeping toward Nazism, in 2010
she became a popular guest on Glenn
Beck’s television show.
Meanwhile, Rand had adopted his
father’s questioning of the government ’s
efforts to alleviate discrimination. In
March of 1982, he responded to a Lar-
iat op-ed writer who favored “some form
of government action” to insure that
A. T. & T. didn’t lose its proportion of
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